A Death in Diamonds полностью

Joan racked her brain, even though her memory was excellent and she knew she wasn’t missing anything. She and the Queen had never discussed a Diana – not in literature or art, nor as a friend or relative of Her Majesty, or of Joan herself. They might easily have done in any of those guises, which was why she felt Her Majesty was clever to use it. If asked, Joan could make up a dozen false explanations without thinking. But they had not done so. She couldn’t have been mistaken about something that never came up.

And why ‘the Diana’, and not just ‘Diana’? Nothing in this note was accidental.

Joan closed her eyes and trusted to her subconscious again, but this time, it had nothing to offer.

Never mind. She tucked the note into her handbag, refreshed her lipstick in the mirror at the basins and went back to her office. On the way, she paused at the low bookshelf in the corridor containing a full, leatherbound set of the latest Encyclopaedia Britannica. She picked out the volume ‘DAMASCUS TO EDUC’ and took it with her. Once back at her desk, she flipped to the page on ‘Diana’ and skimmed through the entries.

It didn’t take long.

One of the descriptions ran ‘in the Roman religion, goddess of wild animals and the hunt, identified with the Greek goddess Artemis’.

There it was. The Artemis Club had been in the newspapers a lot recently. It was regularly mentioned in the Private Office. That would explain the ‘the’ before the name. But she and the Queen had never discussed the Artemis Club either. That was Prince Philip’s domain. He attended often, the newspapers liked to speculate what he and his friends did there, and he had even been there the night of the . . .

Oh God.

He had been there the night of the Chelsea murders, as had the suspects in the case. But he had come back to the palace before the murders were committed. That was what the papers said.

Oh God, oh God.

She wasn’t mistaken. They were.

Joan watched as her skin formed goosebumps. This would call for more than the ‘diplomacy’ the Queen had so lightly mentioned. It was as delicate and dangerous as anything she had done at Bletchley.

She was terrified at the level of trust and responsibility.

And her body thrilled with it.

The woman in the black silk cocktail dress and matching opera coat looked as if she would be more at home in Mayfair than the run-down streets behind Clapham Common in South London. She was looking for one of the Victorian houses that had long since been converted into flats. When she found the right number, she negotiated the cracked basement steps carefully in her patent heels, dodging the coal sacks and the line of empty milk bottles by the bottom door. She rapped on the knocker and waited.

Eventually, it was opened by a younger blonde, with the bone structure of a movie star and her hair in curlers. She was in the middle of doing her makeup: one lid a perfect cat’s eye, the other bare.

The visitor smiled politely. ‘Are you Beryl? Beryl White?’

‘Who’s asking?’

‘I’m here on behalf of a friend.’

The blonde looked the other woman up and down. ‘Oh, you are, are you? Anyway, she’s out. Can I take a message?’

The woman in black knew that she was talking to Beryl herself. The other woman’s inability to lie convincingly had been noted. ‘It’s about Gina,’ she said.

Beryl went rigid with fear and suspicion.

‘Look,’ she said, catching her breath, ‘I don’t know anything about anything, OK? I haven’t talked – I know how to keep my mouth shut.’ She made to shut the door. ‘So, whoever you’re from, you can put that in your pipe and smoke it.’

The woman in black planted her patent shoe firmly inside the door frame. She talked fast and low.

‘I’m not from whoever you think. In the press, everywhere, Gina’s just been “the tart in the tiara”. I think she deserves more, don’t you? I know she does. This . . . person I’m working with thinks they can help. It can’t bring her back, but it might get justice for her.’

Beryl kept up the pressure on the door. ‘Gina’s dead. There’s no justice for girls like her.’

‘Like us,’ the woman in black said. She held Beryl’s gaze.

Beryl seemed surprised and looked her up and down. Suspicion turned to curiosity.

‘Well, there’s no accounting for taste.’

‘I assure you, I work in the highest circles.’

‘Do you, now? So, your “friend” was a friend of Gina’s, too?’ she asked.

‘Like I say, I have friends in high places. So did she.’

The door opened a fraction wider. ‘Come in.’

Joan walked down the small, cold, dark corridor behind Beryl with a mixture of pride and irony. If Tony Radnor-Milne could take her for a woman of easy virtue, then so, it seemed, could one of the star escorts of the Raffles agency. It had its uses.